In deciding where to go shopping, people often turn to the Internet to look up nearby businesses. For example, people may look up a business's phone number, address, or other business information. This type of business information for a business may constitute a business listing. Although a business may provide their own business listing, an online service provider may aggregate a number of business listings to enable an end user to search through the business listings more expeditiously and to locate various businesses quickly.
However, an online service provider faces a number of challenges in providing business listings to the Internet-savvy user. One challenge is to avoid providing a business listing that is incomplete. For example, the provided business listing may be lacking in a phone number, street address, or other business information. Another challenge is to avoid providing a business listing for a business that has since gone out of business. For example, retail chain business often have multiple business locations in a given area and, at any time, one of these business locations may go out of business. However, even when a particular business location goes out of business, the business listing for that now out-of-business location may still persist. Hence, when the online service provider provides the business listing for the now out-of-business business location, the end user, upon visiting the actual location of the business, will find that the business is no longer there.
Another challenge is to avoid providing business listings established by competitors that masquerade as business listings for another business. For example, Business A may establish a business listing that appears to be for Business B but, in fact, the business listing provides an address for a business location of Business A. These types of business listings harm the end user because the end user may prefer to shop at Business A rather than at Business B.